It’s mostly spam users unfortunately, someone posted a script and guide that allowed auto generation of users on any instance that didn’t have captcha enabled. Since then user counts have started shooting up.
Captcha is now enabled on some instances but the issue will be continuing on other instances that haven’t heard the message yet.
Best we use active users as the main metric to measure growth now.
I just joined here on the recommendations of another user on Reddit.
At least, I think this interface isn’t too much of a shock to the system. Give me time to get used to the whole new world.Welcome over (from kbin, I can see and comment on your comment because kbin and Lemmy are federated with each other and can talk!)
wait why? what happened today that drive so many new accounts today?
r/interestingasfuck and r/shittylifeprotips are both total free-for-alls. Nsfw, spez hate spam, random shitposts… I assume r/pics is still John Oliver. NSFW subs are posting Christian content.
Reddit is kinda on fire at the moment.
Also, ModCoord finally started advertising for alternatives on their latest post. Mentioned Kbin, Lemmy, Squabbles and Tildes.
Piracy is one that pointed directly to communities on Lemmy, but it is not that huge.
Haven’t checked others, but I’d imagine some maybe started doing so as well and there’s where the growth comes from. I don’t really think it’s bots, so far.
The John Oliver pics weren’t quite sexy enough today.
I know all the words you just wrote, but when they’re in that order it just doesn’t make sense.
More news, more protests, porn on /r/all, but this seems pretty high. There have been a few oddly spiky days the last few days, seems like probably bots.
There’s no way this isn’t related to the account creation spam exploit that was found recently.
I’m a bit out of the loop here, what might have happened on June 18 that have precipitated this spike in new accounts?
On a possibly related note, over here in Lemmy.world, there’s a post by the admins that have touched a little on automated account creation. I don’t know if those two are connected though.
Hexbear.net is a community that’s been running on a forked version of Lemmy for a few years now and has ~25k users. Over the weekend they switched over to running core Lemmy, and will be federating in the coming weeks. I believe this is a big part of the jump in users since they would count even though there’s no actual federation yet.
It’s the bit about Hexbear switching over from a fork to mainstream Lemmy (sorry, but that’s how I understood what you said) made things click for me.
I’ve always assumed that even if Hexbear were not federated, its users should have been counted as Lemmy users, but Hexbear using a fork, and thus, not being counted makes sense.
Thanks!
This is an image-post and not a link to the real page, but the active user count follows a more normal curve. This jump in registered users isn’t organic. If it’s not bot accounts, it’s some weird reporting error. Also note… The
lemmy.worldregistered user count didn’t jump all that much… so if it’s bot accounts they’re either not registering there or have already been purged.Hexbear did just federate, and that does bring in like 25k users, but not 100k. But maybe that’s being multi-counted somehow.
This is amazing! I hope we get more and more soon!
Let’s just hope the majority isn’t bots, like some instances have seen.
